Hitchcock / Truffaut Interview Audio Recordings

As you may know, the UW-Cinematheque will present a series of Alfred HItchcock films on Sundays at the Chazen Museum starting on January 26. As part of our efforts to provide contextual information for local screenings, the Madison Film Forum will post links to several Hitchcock resources over the next few weeks.

If you’ve never read the classic book-length interview Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (popularly known as Hitchcock/Truffaut, from it’s cover), do yourself a favor and pick it up and read it as you catch the UW-Cinematheque series. Not only does Truffaut include a complete list of Hitchcock’s cameos (the topic of a future post), he also systematically discusses with Hitchcock each of his films from the early British days through establishing himself as a key figure in Hollywood. This was one of my favorite books as I was a budding cineaste in high school, and many of my friends have it on their bookshelf.

Recently the original audio recordings of the interviews were digitized and posted at archive.org (among other places). Below, in addition to embedding the audio from archive.org, I’ve included a breakdown of the topics in each part of the interview. The first two films of the UW-Cinematheque series, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, are discussed in parts 5 and 7, respectively.

25 PARTS:
– part 1: childhood through to his early years in the film industry
– part 2: “Mountain Eagle” through to the end of the silent era
– part 3: “Blackmail” through to a discussion about American audiences
– part 4: “Rich and Strange” through to realism in films
– part 5: “The 39 Steps” through to plausibility in film and film critics
– part 6: “Secret Agent” and “Sabotage”
– part 7: “Young and Innocent” and “The Lady Vanishes”
– part 8: final years in Britain through to his move to America
– part 9: “Rebecca”
– part 10: discussion about Hollywood through to “Notorious”
– part 11: “Mr and Mrs Smith” through to “Suspicion”
– part 12: “Saboteur” through to “Shadow of a Doubt”
– part 13: “Lifeboat” through to “Spellbound”
– part 14: “Notorious” through to “The Paradine Case”
– part 15: “Rope”
– part 16: “Rope” and “Under Capricorn”
– part 17: “Stage Fright” through to “Strangers on a Train”
– part 18: “Strangers on a Train” through to “I Confess”
– part 19: “Notorious” through to a discussion about suspense
– part 20: initial discussion about the “The Birds” through to “Rear Window”
– part 21: “The Wrong Man” through to “Vertigo”
– part 22: “North by Northwest” through to “Psycho”
– part 23: “Psycho”
– part 24: “The Birds”
– part 25:”Psycho” through to characterization in films